The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Charles Bukowski
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and the effect of it has reached into and over the sacred ivy walls and even out into the streets of Man. Poetry has turned from a diffuse and careful voice of formula and studied ineffectiveness to a voice of clarity and burnt toast and spilled olives and me and you and the spider in the corner. By this, I mean the most living poetry; there will always be the other kind.
In announcing a new “Poetic Revolution,” which he dates as beginning in the mid-Fifties—interestingly, about the time Allen Ginsberg’s Howl appeared—Bukowski is also describing the so-called “Meat School” of poetry which began to loosely coalesce around him with the appearance of Blazek’s Ole magazine and with which poets William Wantling and Steve Richmond were associated. In Ole Anthology (1967), Blazek declares the rationale for the new poetry:
But remember, there are still things to celebrate & the best celebration is expressed in song & the logical extension of song is a shout. So, don’t be timid. If you still care, if that goddamned sun strikes you in the eye right & you feel jubilant, THEN SHOUT! Put your teeth into those words. Lift some weights. Get that blood to cooking. Sneak in a peek between your crotch & see if you still have hair there. If there is hair, say there is hair. Don’t hide the balls either. If there are balls then include the balls & make them look like balls, know they are balls. POETRY WITH BALLS! POETRY THAT IS DANGEROUS! MEAT POETRY! Juice to make the ears jump . . . SOMETHING! as Bukowski says.5
Although Bukowski himself never acknowledged being either a founder or member of such a movement, it is clear that both he and the poets he inspired attempted to loosely formulate an aesthetic position which distinguished them from the other “schools” of American poetry: Confessional, Black Mountain, Deep Image, New York, Objectivist, Imagist.
Another distinguishing feature of Bukowski’s autobiographical prose/fiction is its structure as an extended roman à clef. Fellow writers continually appear under different names and he settles scores with them—as D.H. Lawrence often did in his satirical portraits of friends and acquaintances—while also often portraying himself in the worst possible light. For example, “Tony Kinnard” is Kenneth Patchen, and although the story carried a disclaimer— “Note: There is no intent to hurt or malign living persons with this story. I am sincere when I say this. There is enough hurt now. I doubt that anything happened as happened in this story. The author was only caught in the inventiveness of his own mind. If this is a sin, then all creators of all times have sinned . . . c.b.”—Kenneth Rexroth was reportedly infuriated by the tale, vowing that he would cause physical injury to Bukowski were they ever to meet.6 Bukowski’s relationship with another poet—William Wantling, here named “Jim”—forms the background of the story involving the woman “Helen,” actually Ruth Wantling, the poet’s widow. Bukowski picks Helen up at the airport and then spends several odd days and nights in boorish emotional combat with her. Again, Bukowski describes his own boorish behavior as he attempts to get Helen into bed. Yet another example is the story about “June” and “Clyde,” editors of the magazine Dustbird—clearly Jon and Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb, editors of The Outsider and publishers of two Bukowski poetry collections, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (1963) and Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965).7 Here again he makes a pass at Gypsy Lou, another widow of a close friend. In other stories not included in this volume, John Bryan—editor of Open City—is pilloried, as is Harold Norse. Clearly, Bukowski lavishly criticizes others, but he also holds himself up for ridicule. Like Henry Miller, he enjoys magnifying his faults and madness, delighting in caricatures of sins of all kinds.
During the early 1970s, Bukowski’s fame increased following the premiere of Taylor Hackford’s documentary on public television and his readings in San Francisco. Linda King figures in the story describing his reading at City Lights: here literary figures again proliferate as we find allusions to Ginsberg, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. Furthermore, a story dealing with the early days of his relationship with Linda King—some of which reappears in Bukowski’s novel Women (1977)—is entirely composed and shaped within a literary framework. The tale begins with an allusion to W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and to the composition of Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office; he then meets Linda at a poetry reading. King has read Bukowski’s writings about women and critiqued them; they write letters to each other; he writes a poem about her; and finally writes the story itself. In fact, several of the most important women in Bukowski’s life were connected to him through his writing. Barbara Frye was editor of Harlequin, where his early work was published; Frances Smith was herself a poet who became curious about him after reading his work; Linda Lee Beighle also knew of Bukowski through his writings and met him for the first time at a poetry reading.
After quitting his job at the post office, Bukowski began to earn his living by giving poetry readings, as well as from his royalties, book sales, and writing for periodicals. His account describing two readings at university campuses, which appeared in Candid Press, December 20, 1970, opens with a bravura non-stop paragraph containing not a single period: “I swung three deep out of Vacantsville, like bursting out of a herd of cow, and next thing I knew we had set down, the bird burst its stupid stewardesses, and I was the last man out, to meet a teacher-student in a shag of yellow and he said, you, Bukowski, and there was something about his car needing oil . . .” and the energetic sentence continues unimpeded on its way. Several of our selections depict him in a typical scenario: arriving on a college or university campus, drinking, giving his reading, and ending up in bed with a usually admiring female. Again the role of “writer” is both celebrated and lampooned as he exaggerates, jokes, and gives comical answers to ponderous questions: “I mean, I write poems, stories, novels. The poems are basically true, the rest is truth mixed with fiction. Do you know what fiction is? . . . Fiction is an improvement on life.” The poetry reading becomes the scene of raucous insults and the post-reading party provides opportunities for the lofty poetic impulse to be brought back down to one of its purposes: the song, like a bird’s, to attract a female.
Bukowski the journalist and book reviewer is also represented in these selections. In one of his earliest columns for the Los Angeles Free Press, on March 17, 1967—“Bukowski Meets a Merry Drunk”—the narrator reveals at the close that his “little talk” with the “merry drunk” might appear in the LAFP.8 In his essay concerning the Rolling Stones, we can see Bukowski the journalist at work. He also reviewed a Rolling Stones concert in “Jaggernaut,” an essay published in Creem: here he narrates the same event but takes a different approach, dramatizing the experience from a fresh angle.9 This is of course his method as an autobiographical writer: he constantly tells and retells his life history from a variety of viewpoints throughout his prose and poetry. Bukowski describes his adventures writing for erotic magazines, describing a trip to an adult bookstore where he is nonplussed by the sophomoric level of the content of these productions, while in “Politics and Love,” he depicts a hapless journalist sent to interview a violent South American dictator.
Ernest Hemingway returns like a leitmotif throughout Bukowski’s work. In his “Introduction” to Horsemeat, Bukowski points out that “Hemingway liked the bullfights, right? He saw the life-death factors out there. He saw men reacting to these factors with style—or the other way. Dostoevsky needed the roulette wheel even though it always took his meager royalties and he ended up subsisting on milk.” This theme returns in a seminal essay “Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way,” a central document of Bukowski’s poetics in which he speaks of the centrality of the struggle of the horserace as metaphor for the act of creation. In the preface to one of his early plays, William Saroyan—an influence on Bukowski and an author to whom he frequently alludes—noted that the writer “must put his inner force, and the inner force of all living and all energy into the contest with non-existence. He simply must do so.”10 For Bukowski, Saroyan’s “contest with non-existence” is the horserace, which confronts him with the contingency of chance and luck in their confrontation with free will, determinism, and the mystery of time. In his review of Hemingway’s posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970), Bukowski asserts: “This book does not make it. I wanted this book to make it. I have been pulling for Hemingway to hit one out of the lot for a long time now. I wanted another novel like The Sun